communityleadershipsummitfandomcom-20200213-history
Governance Styles
Session: Governance Styles Organizer: Randy Fay notes: Jefro NOTES drupal civilty consensus do-ocracy equality built into history not expandable no policy making techniqiues dries- benevolent dictator for life bdfl governance can mean number of tihngs just making clear way that decisions are made if >1 people have opinions, may never make decisions need technique for dealing with conflicts culture makes everything work governance makes culture work better eg with government some families work with minimal governance bc culture is strong interesting diversity of communities debian - constitution, membership criteria, voting, exec director voted no commercial sponsor very explicit democratic organization yet roots in anti-authoritarianism "nobody can make you do nothin'" kde - less structure than drupal, sum is conflict resolution group about 1000 contribs value determined by contribution many open source projects have benevolent dictator ubuntu, wikipedia - founder debian does not ubuntu also has a commercial sponsor with the purse strings go the power will determine direction of project in drupal, deny that have one but actually do if choose to spend on community, will affect it wikipedia has benev dictator, explicitly limited power on governanace pages, described - privilege relinquished by x conversation still holds a lot of power informally wordpress.org - open source community with bdfl, matt mullenweg doesn't mind being directive significant set of contribs wordpress.com company - automattic dries lets community make decisions, only steps in when necessary linux kernel - 1200 people, huge user base but narrow contributor path 12k lines of code per day 12-ish maintainers, each line patch has maintainer & submitter linus final right to veto? does not tolerate fools slightly more than half corporate contribs healthy division among many companies - top company is maybe 12% code, 30% signoffs compiling for 60-70 hw platforms in australia, automated testing fedora - divided out governance of tech issues vs people issues, event issues formed steering committee for tech decisions ambassador steering committee manages events many conflicts in any community - technical approaches, personnel touchyfeely issues, resolving conflicts people good at resolving one type not necc good at other also board of directors to help as final arbiter as director - if I have to be involved, doing something wrong thus at odds with board hired by redhat redhat wanted fedora on its own for many reasons separate foundation didn't work rh pays bills but do not dictate hands-off open & transparent strauss frustrated with influence from canonical, specif shuttleworth frust withdouble standard - not actually meritocratic for fedora, rh has to go through same process, via steering committee don't exercise back channel influence tierry carrez gentoo - bd failed, made way for more democratic system - needs to be respected, otherwise if not representative, doesn't work linux kernel grew organically canonical - model is sneaky, pretending to be open source, but mark has strong veto power make strong calls not necc representing what community wants sometimes fedora model makes harder to get things done focused on short term or long term success? top down is short term, open/collaborative/meritocratic helps grow community overlong term openstack building governance from scratch like linux kernel, open innovation setting no single company owns hrad to have benev dictator model, hard to hire one person respected by everyone just elected policy board, change out every 6 months moving toward foundation model - board on one side, control brand etc, tech community still meritocratically elected sep from money side java.net - forge/editorial page sonja barry sponsored by oracle benevolent dictator tryto be invisible but available advocate for community to oracle, but if division create safe place w/o registering opinions java community process, glassfish/flagship java projects sb has veto power loose terms of use any individual group/project can create own governance as long as narrower than overall terms of use lawsuit hudson v jenkins - expecting email from sb, got email from glassfish team didn't open, didn't realize project being moved, panic attack in public communication broke down just a stupid miscommunication lesson in good forks & bad forks reason why communities break up & move on, better than missed email hudson could have been stronger job to educate oracle about community oracle spends 10x corp open source, like ms - implicit structure, vs. github freeform depends on personality of project founder sb welcome anyone - splash page on java.net just fine big projects need massive bug trackers, etc so need resources from other places still in infancy homeschooling - rodger williams bd has to have respect from people all people governance re asshole talk - mistake not to throw people out fast enough drupal - working group mon/tue, dries present angie byron lioness of civility expect technical vs community division already have some structure for technical division issue queues but deadlocks often abandoned instead of resolved on technical side on community side, conflic resolution group funadmentally, no explicit wayto create or enforce policy tends to be ad hoc implicit policy tends to make people feel disempowered create ways to make explicit policy, but wnat to be gentle dstrauss less policy, or more clear origin for policy fiefdoms sometimes grows organically (esp if they wrote the code) american business model is last vestige of feudalism drupal.org, until a yr ago couldn't make it work better just a few people held the power, would veto attempts to go forward if they didn't understand it about 1.5 yrs ago, initiative & set policy, now enormous # beautiful things have happened as a result went from having cathedral to instances, sandboxes, results w/o having to think theoretically workflow & tools need to evolve at same pace as policy initiative for core, delegated some power down to initiative owners but infrastruc hasn't evolved to accommodate workflow tried to layer policy onto system based on groundswell from flat plane greg dunlap - can say what's important, but doesn't force anyone to work on it dstrauss went to fedora to gain perspective on issues, wnat to see drupal take on gigantic underatkings like systemd not everyone agrees with, but big risky thing, requires hwolesale coordination who decides? how to get people to work on jared smith - fedora steering committee chooses what ready to go in, take longer, won't accept some credibility in community - we voted for fesco body to make decisions & stand behind organizational democracy manage coworking space entirely democratically run as a business decide terms of service by majority vote difficult sometimes forces into conversation avoid voter fatigue, don't vote on boring stuff weekly civics meetings on direction membership in community - relative parity find own level those most interested will stick around to vote those who have a goal in mind java.net 840k members democracy doesn't scale thierry debian counter example project lead tries to stay out as much as possible